glibc ld.so in versions before 2.11.3, and 2.12.x before 2.12.2 does not properly restrict use of the LD_AUDIT environment variable when loading setuid executables. This allows loading arbitrary shared objects from the trusted library search path with the privileges of the suid user.

This module uses LD_AUDIT to load the libpcprofile.so shared object, distributed with some versions of glibc, and leverages arbitrary file creation functionality in the library constructor to write a root-owned world-writable file to a system trusted search path (usually /lib). The file is then overwritten with a shared object then loaded with LD_AUDIT resulting in arbitrary code execution.

This module has been tested successfully on glibc version 2.11.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 x86_64 and version 2.7 on Debian 5.0.4 i386.